Asimov remembered it differently: “No one tried to stop me. I just walked in.” Once he was inside, he regretted it, and he wondered whether he should leave in a show of solidarity. Looking around the room, however, he saw Campbell, the artist Frank R. Paul, de Camp, and Williamson, whom he had met earlier that summer, and he guiltily decided to stay.
As the morning wore on, the Futurians kept trying to enter in pairs, but they were repeatedly turned back. Williamson came out to see them, and Campbell tried to persuade Sykora to let them in, but was refused. At lunch, Asimov crept out to buy coffee and a chicken sandwich. Instead of branding him as a traitor, as he had feared, the others saw him as an undercover operative. They badgered him for details, and Leslie Perri, Pohl’s girlfriend, joined him as he went back inside.
At two in the afternoon, Moskowitz called the convention to order. After a screening of the film Metropolis, which Asimov hated, Campbell delivered a talk on the evolution of science fiction, pointing to the movie as an example of what the genre could accomplish. He stated that their goal should be one of constant advancement, and he proclaimed that his magazine was prepared to lead the charge.
Around seven in the evening, Sykora rose to introduce various notables in the audience. The writer John Clark yelled, “How about Asimov?” As the crowd shouted its approval, Asimov stood up, delighted and bewildered, to make his way toward the front. As he passed Campbell, the editor grinned and gave him a friendly shove forward, nearly toppling him over.
Asimov climbed onto the stage. He saw that Perri was gesticulating furiously, but he wasn’t sure what she wanted. After a brief speech in which he referred to himself as “the worst science fiction writer unlynched,” he sat down again, relieved. Later, he learned that Perri had wanted him to deliver a statement in support of the exiled Futurians, which had never even crossed his mind.
Afterward, it was generally agreed that the first Worldcon had been a resounding success, heralding a closer relationship between fans and professionals and setting a precedent for conventions to follow. The fact that it had taken place just as the July 1939 issue of Astounding ushered in the golden age was no coincidence—fandom and the magazine had reached a new level of maturity together.
In the short term, the Great Exclusion Act, as it became known, had the effect of stabilizing the community. New Fandom and its successors would run conventions, while the Futurians—who were less a real club than a cult of personality around Wollheim and Michel—withdrew into themselves to produce writers and editors. What they shared was a sense of identity that science fiction afforded. Many were young men about to be swallowed up by the war, and the genre, which taught that outsiders were the ones who made the future, told them that their lives had value.
Ironically, most of the Futurians would never break through with the editor who was more responsible than anyone else for awakening them to the field’s possibilities. Campbell regarded them with suspicion, to the extent that he thought of them at all, and they didn’t go out of their way to endear themselves. At one meeting, Pohl brought along Cyril Kornbluth, who was openly disrespectful toward Campbell. Afterward, Kornbluth explained, “I wanted to make sure he remembered me.”
In time, the Futurians formed what amounted to a counterculture to the establishment that Campbell represented, with Asimov caught somewhere in the middle. Campbell was less interested in fans who were willing to suffer for science fiction than in technically minded professionals who wrote on the side—which made them more receptive to his notes—or in reliable writers for hire. Hubbard, to his eyes, was one of the latter. And he was about to make his greatest discovery of all, a former Navy man and political activist who fulfilled his wildest hopes almost overnight.
FOR ALL THEIR AVOWED RADICALISM, THE FUTURIANS APPROACHED POLITICS AS SOMETHING TO BE debated over table tennis and banana splits. Robert A. Heinlein, who later called it the only game fit for adults, got to know it on the ground. He had entered the political arena out of admiration for Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle, who was drafted to run for governor of California in 1933. Sinclair, a progressive socialist, based his platform on a program called End Poverty in California, or EPIC, that called on the state to provide jobs for more than a million unemployed workers.
Heinlein had settled with his wife, Leslyn, in Southern California, where he was living off his naval pension. He was attracted by Sinclair’s politics, which reflected his conviction that economic freedom was the basis of liberty, and he volunteered at EPIC, where he was given oversight of seven precincts. After a decisive loss, Heinlein remained at the group’s newspaper, and he became friends with Cleve Cartmill, a journalist and aspiring science fiction writer.
During the municipal elections of April 1935, Heinlein served as a district chairman, and he began to see the danger of being associated with radical movements. In May, he was admonished by the secretary of the Navy for writing a letter to the Hollywood Citizen-News—to which he had signed his rank—condemning the police response to a student riot. He took responsibility, but he grew wary of being labeled an extremist. Unlike the Futurians, many of whom held a rosy view of Moscow, he saw the Soviet Union as “a grisly horror.”
Later that summer, he and Leslyn bought a house on Lookout Mountain Avenue in Laurel Canyon. With another election on the way, he spent hours campaigning in person and held weekly breakfasts for his district workers, with Leslyn baking the cookies. They were so in tune that they finished each other’s sentences, but both were feeling the stress of politics, as well as a lack of money—Heinlein had made an unsuccessful stab at real estate, and he fell short in his attempt to run for a seat in the California State Assembly in 1938.
Heinlein also became interested in General Semantics, a discipline developed by the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski. In his monumental book Science and Sanity, Korzybski warned against the fallacy of confusing words with their underlying objects, as expressed in the aphorism for which he would be best remembered: “The map is not the territory.” General Semantics was a mental engineering program that trained its users to avoid such mistakes, and Heinlein was particularly drawn to the concept of “time binding,” which stated that man was the one animal that could build on the abstractions created by previous generations—but only if it knew how.
In any event, he had to find a real job, and he was weighing his options when his eye was caught by a call for submissions in the October 1938 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. It occurred to him to try his hand at writing, and while Leslyn was hospitalized for an appendectomy, he began work on a novel that he conceived as an extension of his politics. Many of his favorite writers, such as Edward Bellamy and H. G. Wells, had used fiction to advance their ideas, and just as Campbell had used the genre to indulge in his fantasy of being a great inventor, Heinlein saw it as a vehicle for the political convictions that he had been unable to put into practice.
Heinlein decided to structure For Us, the Living around his interest in a proposal for a universal basic income, and he worked on it diligently until Christmas. After Leslyn returned from the hospital, he asked for her advice, searching “for plot twists and climaxes” as they sat together in the kitchen. In the end, it wasn’t very good. Heinlein saw it less as a human story than as an excuse for long discussions of monetary theory, and it showed—but there were also scattered signs of promise, along with elements of a future history that he would continue to mine for decades.
The novel failed to get any traction with publishers, but the appearance of Unknown inspired him to turn to short fiction. After pitching ideas to Leslyn, he settled on a story about a machine that can predict when a person will die—a premise inspired by the death of Alice McBee, the woman he had once hoped to marry. Its centerpiece was a vivid description of the shape of an individual life: “Imagine this space-time event . . . as a long pink worm, continuous through the years. . . . The cross section we see appears as a single, discrete body. But that is illusion.”
Heinl
ein finished it in four days in April 1939. He wasn’t sure if “Life-Line” was science fiction or fantasy, so he sent it to the one editor with titles in both genres, along with postage for its return: “I hope you won’t need it.” Two weeks later he received a short letter from Campbell offering to buy the story for seventy dollars, which prompted him to demand, “How long has this racket been going on? And why didn’t anybody tell me about it sooner?”
It wasn’t hard to see how he broke in so quickly. Unlike Asimov, who submitted all his first efforts, Heinlein, at thirty-one, had already written a whole novel, and the didactic ambitions that sank For Us, the Living had also allowed him to practice for thousands of words in private. Without the example of Wells or Bellamy, it never would have occurred to him to write at length, since there was no viable market for science fiction in book form. And “Life-Line” wouldn’t have been nearly as good if Heinlein hadn’t gotten so many bad habits out of his system.
If Campbell had treated him as ruthlessly as Asimov, Heinlein might well have given up on writing altogether. Unlike Asimov, who was obsessed with science fiction, Heinlein saw it as just another potential career, and without outside encouragement, he might have dropped it. Thankfully, Campbell liked the story, and Heinlein responded with just the kind of résumé that the editor would find enticing: “I am a retired naval officer. When I was in the fleet, my specialty was ballistics, with emphasis on the electro-mechanical integrators used in fire control.”
Campbell was interested, but this didn’t mean that he took everything, and Heinlein’s second effort was sent back. The editor told him that it suffered from a contrived villain: “I think if you would amputate you’d have a much better yarn.” Heinlein took him literally, cutting out the character and splicing the ends together, and Campbell bought the revision, which was published as “Misfit.” His next two submissions were rejected, but the editor remained encouraging: “Your work is good. Even this is good, despite the fact it’s bouncing.”
Taking a page from Sinclair Lewis, who had prepared a timeline of events while writing the novel Babbitt, Heinlein hung up an old navigational chart and began to map out a future history. He depended enormously on Leslyn: “I work very slowly, three to six pages a day at the beginning, and spend much more time discussing the story with Mrs. Heinlein than in actual composition. My stories are actually collaborations with her, although I do all the actual writing. We talk it out, until we are both satisfied with each notion, then I set it down in its final form.”
Heinlein labored over a novella, eventually titled “If This Goes On—,” that he finished in August. The account of a revolution against a false prophet in a dystopian America was his first great story, with an unconventional structure that he would often employ in his subsequent work—a riveting opening followed by a second half that picked apart its assumptions. It displayed his matchless ability to follow a story down unexpected byways without losing the reader’s attention, and Campbell praised its logic as magnificent, especially “the mass of small details that made it real,” which he identified decades later as the author’s primary contribution to the genre:
Cultural patterns change; one of the things Heinlein “invented” was the use of that fact. . . . Like the highly skilled acrobat, he makes his feats seem the natural, easy, simple way—but after you’ve finished and enjoyed one of his stories . . . notice how much of the cultural-technological pattern he has put over, without impressing you, at any point, with a two-minute lecture on the pattern of the time.
The editor called it “one of the strongest novels I have seen in science fiction,” and he would publish it as a “Nova” story, a designation reserved for exceptional work. He particularly liked its awareness that societies could evolve, as well as the implication that psychology could be turned into a science. As one character noted darkly, “The American people have been conditioned from the cradle by the cleverest and most thorough psychotechnicians to believe in and trust the dictatorship which rules them. . . . If you free them without adequate psychological preparation, like horses led from a burning barn, they will return to their accustomed place.”
Campbell was slightly worried by the religious angle, which was “a definitely warmish subject to handle,” and when he proposed a few changes to clarify that the cult was fake, Heinlein said that he would be more careful. They were feeling each other out, with subtle moves on both sides. The editor thought that the story “Requiem,” which Heinlein called “my pet,” was saccharine, but he bought it as an experiment to see if readers would accept it, and he was interested to hear that Heinlein was contemplating a series set in a shared future history.
Heinlein rapidly became a fan favorite. Asimov praised “Life-Line” in a letter to the magazine, and he also wrote Heinlein directly. Pohl, who had talked his way into editing the pulps Astonishing and Super Science Stories at the age of nineteen, bought “Let There Be Light,” a gadget story that Heinlein published as Lyle Monroe. He was saving his real name for Campbell, to whom he sent the ambitious “Lost Legacy,” which was inspired by an item that the editor had written in Unknown about the apparently unused structures of the brain.
Campbell rejected it: “It’s good. It should be great.” He saw it as a superman story, which he was starting to think was impossible to tell, and advised Heinlein to avoid forcing the narrative: “L. Ron Hubbard, who is my idea of a man who is both professional and artist in his writing, refuses to write any story that is hard work. That’s not laziness; that’s because, if it’s hard for a writer to work out his story, somewhere there’s a motivating principle missing.”
It was a generous rejection, but Heinlein felt that Campbell had missed the point—the story wasn’t about supermen, but the capacities inherent in everyone. He was also irritated by the final version of “Requiem,” to which the editor had added an ending that ruined the tone. Yet he knew that Astounding was the best possible platform for his ideas, and as long as he retained enough freedom to express himself, he intended to provide more or less what Campbell wanted.
He decided to focus on straight science fiction, which was all that he had sold so far. Campbell took “The Roads Must Roll,” and he gave Heinlein a premise, based on his visit to the Columbia cyclotron, about atomic engineers: “They’ll nearly all go mad one way or another after about ten years of work.” It was one of his first explicit connections between psychology and nuclear power, and Heinlein wrote it up as “Blowups Happen,” with a cover letter that reflected their growing closeness: “I hope that both Don A. Stuart and Doña Stuart will enjoy it.”
In the meantime, Heinlein was getting to know other writers in Los Angeles, with the breakfasts that he had held for his precinct workers evolving into a writer’s group called the Mañana Literary Society. It allowed him to assume a leadership role, which suited his personality—although Leslyn was equally prominent—and he passed ideas from Campbell to its members, who included an eager, unpublished nineteen-year-old named Ray Bradbury. Years later, Bradbury gratefully remembered his mentorship: “Heinlein taught me human beings.”
But Heinlein was its unquestioned star. After the check from “Blowups Happen” allowed him to pay off his mortgage, he contemplated cutting back on his output, prompting Campbell to lament to Pohl, “The trouble with Bob Heinlein is that he doesn’t need to write.” When the author mentioned the possibility of a visit to New York, Campbell said that he would reschedule his vacation so that they could meet. Heinlein and Leslyn drove across the country, financing their trip with the sale of his novella “Magic, Inc.,” and arrived in the city on May 18, 1940.
Campbell wasn’t there. Doña’s mother had been sick, and they were in Boston when she died on Sunday, May 19. They spent the following week settling up the estate, returning on Friday to New York, where they attended a war game hosted by the writer Fletcher Pratt. The weekly battles—in which wooden ships were moved across the floor according to an elaborate set of rules—were a regular meeting place for s
cience fiction authors, and it was there that the Campbells met the Heinleins. Campbell told Swisher, “Heinlein puts on a bit of Annapolis manners, and Mrs. H is naturally reserved—but they loosened up quickly, and they both are darned interesting.”
The four of them stayed out until two in the morning—Doña didn’t want to go home alone—and from the beginning, they had a remarkably intense connection. Doña had just lost her mother, to whom she had been close, and she was pregnant with their first child, which made her more receptive than usual to new friends. Campbell, in turn, was fascinated by Heinlein’s naval stories, and he later invited them over for dinner in New Jersey, where they discussed a story that never came to fruition:
The gag was that our mad scientist of two or three or more generations back had spilled some sort of a catalyst in the oceans which caused the formation of an as-yet-unnumbered type of ice, heavier than water and stable at ordinary temperatures. The oceans “freeze” solid, many persons die, the remaining few build up a culture in which fresh water is semi-precious.
It was based on an idea, current in science fiction circles, that was originally developed by the chemist Irving Langmuir. Decades later, Kurt Vonnegut would use it as the premise for the novel Cat’s Cradle.
On another night, the Campbells attended a party at the apartment of Heinlein’s friend John Arwine, where the visiting couple was staying. Leslyn served a tamale pie, while Doña asked Heinlein to define his political beliefs. The conversation moved on before he could answer, but he took the question seriously, and he stayed up until three in the morning to type up his response. He had taken the time to write it, he informed Doña, because “you and John are of the small group whose approval and understanding I need to be happy.”
Hubbard was also there. Heinlein had been impressed by a serial that the younger author had written, telling Campbell, “If you write to L. Ron Hubbard, please tell him for me that I consider his Final Blackout one of the most nearly perfect examples of literary art it has been my privilege to read. His comprehension and ability to portray the character of the commissioned professional military man is startling. I find myself wondering intently as to whether he himself has been such a man, or whether he is an incredibly astute observer and artist.”
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